Blue-collar Xmas -- extended with comments

Christmas is a hard month (or more) to get through.  There's the ever more desperate commercialism that puts up decorations before Thanksgiving, the relentless outpouring of holiday songs, some of which sound like anthems of sentimentality from the ancient world (think the original Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer by Gene Autry), and the mawkish stories on the local news (the only time they cover the Bronx when there's not been a murder).

Not to mention everyone's personal parcel of disappointments marked "Do Not Open til Xmas!"

I don't celebrate Christmas any more.  It's a lot of bother.  I got rid of the decorations after my wife died.  My family's dispersed.  I can't stand the nostalgia and pain.  And I haven't felt any of the holiday's mystical pull since my own kids were little. 

Was it a mystical pull, though?  Was it about the miraculous?  The animals talking?  The light of peace and love lit in every heart?  The sense, almost the image, of a heavenly snow of grace on all creatures all over the world?  A truce in the struggle for survival, in the selfishness of the everyday?

I don't know.  Some part of me longs for it to be true even now.  But I can tell you, as a humble blue-collar kid, that Christmas was the one time in the turning year when even we could be as delighted and content as the rich.  When our foods and toys and gaudy decorations glowed in the early darkness and gave us a warmth that we could not afford the rest of the long winter.  The one time we did not feel alone in our anxiety, and the only time we could get a little loud and a little tipsy and not fear this would turn ugly, because we were with our friends and neighbors. 

I think these glimpses of memory and feeling are why the tasteful Christmases of today leave me cold.  You know, the all-white fairy lights, the color-coordinated decorations and mad accessorization of houses and yards.  The lifestyle-magazine-inspired recipes that make each dish into a little masterpiece that cries, "Me!! Me!!" instead of inviting you to dig in and make merry.  The excessive worry over wine pairings.  All materialistic devices meant to take the emotional sting out of the season's inevitable disappointments.

The best Christmas of my life was when I was about 10 or 11 years old.  My father was long gone, there were four of us kids -- three of them under 5 -- and we were getting by, just, on welfare.  Things were bleak indeed.  One evening about 10 days before Christmas, two of my mother's old friends from the phone company came by.  They said, "Norma, we've got a couple of things for the kids."  Then they unloaded

bag after bag of food.  All the Christmas stuff -- a turkey, potatoes, canned veggies, nuts, candy, dried fruit, flour, dates, baking chocolate -- and more.  It was clear even to me that they were making sure we'd have food for the winter. "The girls took up a little collection..."  The women who delivered the groceries were the ones who spearheaded the collection.  True friends.  (For the record, and may they be blessed in heaven if there is any such thing, their names were Carrie Proctor and Olive "Ducka" Stone.)

There were some presents for each of the kids, as well as for my mother, but the thing that we'd always remember was the food.  Not only a huge number of fresh oranges and tangerines, a real luxury for us, but the potatoes and the canned and dried foods that we used to survive all winter. 

We cried as they kept bringing in more and more. It was the closest thing to receiving grace and the spirit of the season that I ever experienced.  It was exactly like the way Donna Reed reacts at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life," exactly.  

So give me one of those corny old messy, slightly desperate blue-collar Xmases.  Complete with big multi-colored light strings and frightfully vulgar tinsel. Just let me watch it on TV.  Once was enough.

And he did almost put his eye out

Comments

[Morgan]

awesome.

[beth - the wine school]

If that isn't what christmas is and should be about - all that you just wrote - then god help us one and all. Beautiful Strappo. Thanks so very much.

[Strappo]

Thank you, thank you.

There were many, ah, pungent details that I could have put in but -- you know.

To put the wonderful Christmas in context, it was 1956 (I was indeed 10), and the day after New Years, my mother had just cleaned up the tree and decorations and my aunt moved in with her two kids. No means of support, visible or invisible. So my mother had to feed 7 people (4 in diapers, and the diapers had to be wrung my hand and hung outside till Ma's hands bled) on something like $100 week, plus heat, utilities and house payment, not to mention clothes, etc., etc. Trust me, even in 1957 $100 a week didn't take you too far.

Plus I was sick -- I had had what amounted to a heart attack in church one Sunday in December, and we were waiting for an appointment with a pediatric heart specialist in Boston.

It was a pretty cold winter. We pretty much lived in the kitchen because elsewhere in the house you could see your breath. I put a thermometer in my mother's room one morning when she said, "God, it's really cold up there this morning." 27F. She turned off the heat so that the kids could get a little warmth. Because I was the sickly one, my room was the warmest -- averaged about 55F. Yes, we slept in our coats some nights.

So we went from the best Christmas to the worst winter very fast. Then the township welfare people said we should move out of our house and give up our car (16 years old) and our telephone, because people on welfare shouldn't have any of those things. The Christmas spirit sure died a quick death.

So there I was, contemplating an early death, homelessness and, oh yes, I learned the welfare people deducted the $2 I cleared each week from my crappy little paper route. That really killed me. My mother was a pretty awful person later on, and these experiences did a lot of the damage to her psyche, but she was stalwart and uncomplaining when it came to letting me make my few cents a week.

So...you guys have got me really thinking about those days. For me there are no good old days. Good old moments, but nothing good lasted long. And people wonder why I'm angry. And why I skew waaayyyy left.

And I don't divulge all this to make you feel sorry for me -- it was another life ago, for Chrissake -- but it is a reminder of how a sizable percentage of our population lives. And their numbers will grow in the years ahead.

[alex]

@ Terry,
grazie per aver condiviso con noi i tuoi ricordi (belli e meno belli).
ciao
alex

[Fredric Koeppel]

Damn yer eyes, here I sit under the glaring florescent lights of the dismal newsroom and you bring a tear to this old eye.

it's funny our attitudes toward xmas. In 1995 or '96, when LL was doing extensive research for her dissertation and traveling a lot, she returned in early december from about a month in Washington, being holed up at the Archives of American Art, and said, "I can't do Christmas this year." and we haven't had a tree since then and almost no decorations of any kind. and we're ambivalent about the whole xmas gift thing: should we give each other presents, should we not? should we celebrate some way? ignore the whole situation? we remain anxious (and for me depressed) about the whole freaking thing. No kids in town this year. for the past couple of years I have done an xmas eve dinner for the two of us, the whole english thing of standing rib roast w/ yorkshire pudding and brussels sprouts with a bottle of good Bordeaux followed by cheeses and port, but guess what, I'm working on xmas eve this year. fuck it.

[Steve H]

i was there on mudnock at that very christmas looking at it with eyes of the 4 year old.

it was the best and worst of times which is why now, 51 years later, i still have trouble making up my mind.

i had the best view as i had already been banished to that ungodly cold bedroom for the night and heard the hubbub, went to the window, and observed the whole spectacle from the 2nd floor window. the station wagon backed up to the door to unload.

it was magical. and terry is right. years ago we were looking at old black and white photos from that era and as he said, we all kind of looked like bosnian refugees. crappy clothes and that emaciated goofy look.

i still wear crappy clothes, but at least i'm not underfed!

may everyone be happy, balanced, warm and content this christmas.

buon natale!

one of the dispersed.

[AJ]

Excellent post! Thanks for the reset. We all have so much to be thankful for.

[Strappo]

Steve H sent me an email and said that the main thing he remembered was being cold all the time. Probably because he was hungry too. We had a lot of scalloped potatoes for supper (e basta).